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    At Avignon Festival, Theater’s World Gets Wider

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    Under its new director, the event is shining a spotlight on countries and performers rarely represented on the biggest European stages.Who belongs onstage at an international theater festival? It’s a thorny question for programmers with limited spots to fill. Already-famous artists bring predictable box-office returns, yet the picture of “the world” they offer rarely extends beyond a small group of countries.The Avignon Festival, in France, is lucky to be able to go off the beaten track. Every summer, it pulls a large audience that comes to experience a city filled to the brim with theater, rather than individual productions. Artists in the official lineup typically play to sold-out crowds regardless of their reputation, and many Avignon directors have taken this as their cue to experiment.And this year’s edition, with the Portuguese theater-maker Tiago Rodrigues at the helm, seemed to go even further. Of the 38 artists in the lineup, over half were new to Avignon, and many were unknown in France. As the first week of the festival unfolded, the spotlight shone repeatedly on amateurs and artists from countries rarely represented on the biggest European stages.Some, like the former prison inmates from South America who star in Lola Arias’s “The Days Outside” (“Los Días Afuera”), performed at the Opéra Grand Avignon, directly expressed their disbelief at being there from the stage. One performer showed a tattoo of the Eiffel Tower on her body, explaining that it had been her dream to see France — and now, she said after a quiet pause during the show, she had.“The Days Outside” is part of this edition’s tribute to Spanish-language theater. Rodrigues is highlighting a different language each year, and after a timid emphasis on English in 2023, he is going much further this time, with 12 productions — roughly a third of the festival’s offering — performed in Spanish, from countries including Spain, Argentina, Uruguay and Peru.“The Days Outside” considers the lives of five women and one trans man as they prepare to leave prison.Christophe Raynaud de Lage/Festival d’AvignonWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      At Avignon Festival, Resisting the Far Right

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      Tiago Rodrigues said the Avignon Festival, which he leads, would become “a festival of resistance,” juggling activism with the premiere of a new play.There are two sides to Tiago Rodrigues, the Portuguese director who has led the Avignon Festival since last year. One — gentle, introspective, given to dissecting intimate human conflicts — has long been evident in his stage productions. That includes “Hecuba, Not Hecuba,” his latest premiere in Avignon, in which a mother fights for justice after her son is mistreated by a state institution.On the other side, Rodrigues has also turned out to be a combative, politically outspoken leader for the French festival, a marquee event on the international theater calendar. Tension is running high in France since the far-right National Rally party came out ahead in the first round of snap parliamentary elections last weekend, and Rodrigues’s response was forceful: Avignon, he told the broadcaster France Info, would become a “festival of resistance.”On Thursday, Rodrigues pulled together a last-minute night of programming aimed at “mobilizing against the far right” ahead of the second round of voting this Sunday. After a performance of Angélica Liddell’s “Dämon: El Funeral de Bergman,” the Cour d’Honneur, Avignon’s biggest stage, was given over to willing artists, politicians and union leaders from 1 a.m. to 6 a.m.The choreographer Boris Charmatz opened the evening with 100 or so dancers who performed a group reinterpretation of “Revolutionary,” a defiant 1922 dance by Isadora Duncan. JoeyStarr, a French rapper, recited a poem by Léon-Gontran Damas.Despite the late hour, the nearly 2,000 seats were packed, and a roar filled the air when Rodrigues, whose father was an antifascist activist in Portugal, finally appeared onstage. “My name is Tiago Rodrigues, and I work for the Avignon Festival,” he said, modestly. “This is a night of democratic union, of strength and hope.”“This is a night of democratic union, of strength and hope,” Rodrigues said from Avignon’s largest stage, the Cour d’Honneur.Arnold Jerocki/Getty ImagesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Angélica Liddell Brings Electricity to Avignon Festival

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      The Spanish director and performer Angélica Liddell elicited a standing ovation at the Avignon Festival in spite of her attacks on critics.Theater critics can be masochistic creatures. On Saturday, the Spanish provocateur Angélica Liddell opened the Avignon Festival in France, one of Europe’s most prestigious theater events, with a no-holds-barred diatribe against them. She quoted, and taunted, several writers who were in the audience.The response from the rows of journalists in attendance, and the nearly 2,000 attendees? A standing ovation.Bizarre and grating as it was, Liddell’s “Dämon: El Funeral de Bergman” (“Demons: Bergman’s Funeral”) brought a level of electricity to the Avignon Festival, which runs through July 21, that few have matched in recent years. Its most prized venue, the open-air Cour d’Honneur of Avignon’s Palais des Papes, or papal palace, tends to foil even the most experienced artists. Not so Liddell and her visceral monologues.She spent long stretches of “Dämon: El Funeral de Bergman” alone on the vast, blood-red stage. Pacing back and forth, she vociferated as if she were possessed. At regular intervals, she took her cue from the intense, misanthropic writings of the Swedish filmmaker Ingmar Bergman, one of her idols. “I am Ingmar Bergman,” she declared at one point, before returning to her favorite themes: death, guilt, sex and excrement.Yet the first vocal shots Liddell fired were directed at critics, in a section called “Humiliations suffered.” With her back turned to the audience, she began reading excerpts from negative reviews of her work, starting with an article by Armelle Héliot, the former chief theater critic of the French newspaper Le Figaro. “Where are you, Armelle?,” Liddell yelled, before moving on to the next name.As those around me realized what was happening, mouths fell open. Many of us thought back frantically on our past reviews, wondering if we were next.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘A Noiva e o Boa Noite Cinderela’ Review: A Performer Drugs Herself

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      In an ethically murky show at the Avignon Festival, the Brazilian performer Carolina Bianchi opens up about how she was drugged and abused, then knocks herself out with a spiked cocktail.A decade ago, the Brazilian performer and director Carolina Bianchi was drugged and assaulted. In “The Bride and the Goodnight Cinderella” (“A Noiva e o Boa Noite Cinderela”), her new stage production at the Avignon Festival in France, she doesn’t merely open up about that experience. She relives part of it, night after night.Bianchi slips a similar drug into a colorful cocktail and drinks it, with a sinister “Cheers.” She talks to the audience about art and trauma, waiting for the effects to kick in, then spends the rest of the show unconscious.This all-too-real performance single-handedly jolted Avignon alive over the first week of the festival, turning Bianchi — an unknown, Amsterdam-based artist — into a sensation at the event. On the night I attended, one woman broke down in sobs on the way out. I felt nauseated at several points, as if “The Bride and the Goodnight Cinderella” had tapped into my own fight-or-flight instinct.The show starts innocuously enough. Bianchi enters in a stylish white ensemble, and proceeds to deliver a lecture from a heavy stack of notes. From a desk, she examines sexual violence against women through the lens of art history, weaving in contemporary cases — chief among them the 2008 rape and murder of Pippa Bacca, a performance artist, as she hitchhiked in Turkey in a wedding dress as part of an artistic project.“The Bride and the Goodnight Cinderella” may be a much safer form of performance art, but it doesn’t feel that way. Twenty minutes in, Bianchi starts drinking her cocktail. Before long, she is slurring her words and hunches over, then lies down on the table and loses consciousness.For a few minutes, time stands still. We know nothing unplanned is likely to happen: According to the French news agency Agence France-Presse, Bianchi takes a mix of tranquilizers, rather than an actual date rape drug (known in Portuguese as a “Goodnight Cinderella”), and medics are on hand. Yet her vulnerability is scarily palpable.After Bianchi is unconscious, the performance takes on a club-like atmosphere, with slinky choreography leading to sexual encounters that never look fully consensual.Christophe Raynaud de LageThen, for the next hour and a half, eight young members from Bianchi’s collective, Cara de Cavalo, take over. The backdrop rises to reveal another set, dotted with what appear to be bodies in various states of decomposition. The performers lie Bianchi down on a mattress next to them, and the atmosphere turns trippy, with loud distorted club music. Slinky choreography leads to sexual encounters that never look fully consensual.Throughout, on screens above them, Bianchi’s words continue to roll. Her narrative isn’t one of healing: She repeatedly compares her need to revisit the assault to Dante’s journey into hell. “How dare they say that surviving is revenge?” the text reads at one point. “No act of catharsis overcomes the damage.”The cast exercise real care toward the unconscious Bianchi. The group’s women are tasked with most of the physical manipulation, and their actions never mimic her assault. Yet one scene near the end would probably be too much to present in many countries. (In Avignon, viewers under 18 were “strongly discouraged” from attending.) Cast members spread Bianchi’s legs and insert a speculum and a small camera into her vagina, with a live video feed and in full view of the audience, as if to simulate a post-rape forensic examination.Is this ethical? Your mileage may vary: As a director, Bianchi is in charge, even as she relinquishes physical control. Yet it is deeply unnerving to experience this scene, knowing that the main protagonist will have little to no memory of it, even as it lives on in the heads of hundreds of audience members. Her inability to remember her own assault, Bianchi explains earlier, haunts her to this day.I hesitate to say “The Bride and the Goodnight Cinderella” should tour widely, because that means Bianchi, who wakes up looking dazed in the final few minutes, will keep putting herself through this ordeal. Still, the production, billed as the first chapter of a trilogy, is already scheduled to visit Belgium, Germany, Spain and Switzerland. And love it or hate it, it doesn’t flinch from an uncomfortable truth: Sometimes there is no safe space to be found from trauma. More

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      At Glamorous French Festivals, Poverty Is Only Onstage

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      The opening productions of the Avignon and Aix-en-Provence Festivals brought tales of the down-and-out to well-heeled spectators. It got awkward.Two events tower over France’s summer festival season each July, held in cities less than 50 miles apart. One, the Avignon Festival, is a bustling, overcrowded celebration of theater; the other, the Aix-en-Provence Festival, offers a more genteel operatic lineup.This week, well-heeled audiences sat down to opening productions at both festivals. Aix, in lieu of opera singers, unusually welcomed actors from the Comédie-Française, France’s most storied theater troupe, for “The Threepenny Opera,” directed by Thomas Ostermeier; in Avignon, the theater collective In Vitro was supplemented with some new faces for Julie Deliquet’s “Welfare.”Both productions touched on a subject that was an awkward fit for those affluent crowds: poverty.Since France has seen the cost of living rise quickly over the past year, it might have felt like an appropriate nod to the times. Yet few things are trickier onstage than asking actors — a profession in which the working class is hardly well-represented — to act “poor.”In the event, the Comédie-Française fares better than Deliquet’s actors, if only because Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s 1928 “The Threepenny Opera” is a riotous satire. Its amoral criminals and beggars are over-the-top inventions, and Ostermeier’s visually subdued production derives most of its pleasures from letting the cast’s superb talents loose.“Welfare” is another matter. It is a close adaptation of a searing 1975 documentary by Frederick Wiseman, who brought his cameras to a New York welfare center and bore witness as claimants dealt desperately with a rigid system. Wiseman himself long wanted to see the material translated onto the stage, and brought the idea to Deliquet, the director of the Théâtre Gérard-Philipe in Saint-Denis, France.Yet “Welfare,” which shared the opening honors in Avignon with a dance production, Bintou Dembélé’s “G.R.O.O.V.E.,” looks as absurd onstage as it is affecting on-screen. No one involved seems to have realized the insurmountable issue: Re-enacting the hardships of real people with performers turns those people into characters, so their stories lose the ring of truth. Fostering the same empathy takes more work, but here, Deliquet seems hesitant to step in.It doesn’t help that the unaffected black-and-white cinematography of Wiseman’s film has been replaced here with a technicolor recreation of a school gymnasium, including a bright teal floor that stretches across the vast outdoor stage of the Cour d’Honneur, Avignon’s most imposing performance venue. It’s as if the sitcom “That 70s Show” had opted to tackle welfare benefits, complete with well-cut, visibly new costumes. (Nothing says “my children are about to starve” like a neatly placed red beret.)The stories told in Wiseman’s film are loosely reorganized here into a day in the life of a welfare center, as case workers deal with one exasperated claimant after the next. One man lost his home in a fire. A couple of recovering addicts are trying to get their lives back on track. A heavily pregnant woman is asked for medical proof of her condition, while the husband of an older lady is withholding her checks.There are comedic moments in the film, but in Deliquet’s stage version, they start to feel involuntarily farcical. The energetic delivery of the cast may be because they need to project in the cavernous space, which holds around 2,000 spectators. The actors playing the claimants use their moments in the spotlight to play up the injustice of the system, instead of simply exemplifying it, as Wiseman’s subjects did so effectively.“Welfare” means well, and it’s easy to see why the new director of the Avignon Festival, Tiago Rodrigues, opted to put the project in a prestigious spot. It acts as a statement of change after the lumbering tenure of his predecessor, Olivier Py, and Deliquet is only the second woman director to receive a Cour d’Honneur slot in the 76-year history of the Avignon Festival.Deliquet deserves it: She is one of France’s top theater-makers, with a string of successes to her name. In “Welfare,” however, she is too respectful of Wiseman’s source material. Some directors, like Alexander Zeldin with his “Inequalities” trilogy, have found the right tone in recent years to tackle underprivileged lives, but “Welfare” looks as if it is playing at poverty.Christian Hecq and Véronique Vella in Thomas Ostermeier’s “The Threepenny Opera,” at the Aix-en-Provence Festival.Jean-Louis FernandezIn Aix, “The Threepenny Opera” may not be an unqualified triumph for Ostermeier, its German director, but at least the show’s roll-call of lowlife misfits is luxuriously cast, and with help from Alexandre Pateau’s sharp new French translation, comes across as it was presumably intended: wry, charismatic, brilliantly individual.Christian Hecq and Véronique Vella are exuberantly, wackily brilliant as the shallow Mr. and Mrs. Peachum, who set out to take down the notorious criminal Macheath for eloping with their daughter Polly. Not all the actors are equally fine singers, so Vella’s powerful voice is an asset here. So are the vocal talents of Marie Oppert, a recent recruit to the Comédie-Française troupe and a trained singer who, in the role of Polly, turned “Pirate Jenny” into a showstopping number.Well-crafted scenes come thick and fast in the first half, but the energy tails off later. It’s as if Ostermeier, directing for the first time in an operatic context, stopped short of going truly big. The set designs are minimalistic: four mics downstage, a black platform behind the actors and a few screens above it that show repetitive Russian constructivism-inspired collages. On the main stage of the Comédie-Française in Paris, where the production will transfer in the fall, the company could simply repurpose the very similar set of Ivo van Hove’s 2022 “Tartuffe.”Maxime Pascal conducts his own ensemble, Le Balcon, who play off the actors well: At one point, a musician even caught a mic Benjamin Lavernhe — a whimsical highlight as the corrupt policeman Tiger Brown — had inadvertently dropped into the pit. Pascal’s reorchestration, adding electronic instruments, lent an intriguing edge to the biting momentum of Weill’s score.As in Avignon, the production was staged on an open-air stage of historical significance, in the courtyard of the Palais de l’Archevêché, where the festival was born in 1948. While it is reasonably sized compared to the Cour d’Honneur, it’s a prestigious venue, where audience members pay up to $180 for the privilege of seeing “The Threepenny Opera.”As with “Welfare,” there is whiplash in watching impoverished characters in such rarefied company. But that’s the reality of prestige theater today. More

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      Avignon Festival Gets Its Buzz Back

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      With striking premieres in the main program and enchanting discoveries on the supplementary Fringe, the eminent event in European theater is flourishing after some difficult years.AVIGNON, France — After two years of pandemic-related disruption, the Avignon Festival is well and truly back. As the event, a longtime highlight on the European theater calendar, got underway here last week, there were familiar sights everywhere. All around the small city center, buzzing crowds filled the streets, while blasé regulars zigzagged between performers handing out fliers for some 1,570 Fringe productions.That’s 500 more shows than last year, when the open-access Fringe — known as “le Off,” and running in parallel with the Avignon Festival’s official program, “le In” — attempted to find its feet again after the 2020 edition was canceled. While coronavirus cases are rising again this month in France, even masks have been few and far between in the Avignon heat.In the “In” lineup, one world premiere captured the boisterous mood better than any other. “One Song,” developed by the Belgian artist Miet Warlop at the Belgian playhouse NTGent, is loud, preposterous and extremely entertaining — if a little troubling. It requires superhuman feats from a group of musicians, dressed like sports competitors, who are alternately cheered on and screamed down by performers cast as zealous fans, in front of a mumbling referee.A double bassist plays his instrument horizontally while doing ab crunches; one of his colleagues must jump up and down to reach a keyboard set above his head. A metronome sets the often wild tempo for the production’s “one song,” composed by Maarten Van Cauwenberghe, which the group performs on a loop. It could hardly be more literal: Its opening lines are “Run for your life/’Til you die.”The cast in “One Song,” developed by the Belgian artist Miet Warlop.Christophe Raynaud de Lage/Avignon Festival Near the end of the performance I saw, the physical extremes that Warlop pushes her cast to execute became a little too real. A violinist who plays on a high beam, sometimes balancing on one leg, became disoriented after jumping off the beam and hit her head hard against it. Despite the concussion risk, she climbed back up and kept going, her face tight with pain.When the show ended with much of the cast collapsed from exhaustion, the instant standing ovation for the show was more than earned, yet it also felt like “The Hunger Games” for theater aficionados. Still, it is a classic Avignon production: ripe for debate long into the night.Other productions from the official lineup were less invigorating, but together they made for a respectable lap of honor for the Avignon Festival’s departing artistic leader, the French writer and director Olivier Py. His eight-year tenure has felt muddled, with quarrels about the event’s dearth of female directors and several ill-conceived premieres on Avignon’s biggest stages.That was especially true of productions at the open-air Cour d’Honneur, a majestic stage inside the city’s Papal Palace. This summer, however, Py corrected course with a high-profile and thought-provoking show, Kirill Serebrennikov’s “The Black Monk.”“The Black Monk” was first staged at the Thalia Theater in Hamburg, Germany, in January, yet much has happened since. A message against a red backdrop during the play’s curtain calls at Avignon — “Stop War” — was a reminder of the conflict in Ukraine and Serebrennikov’s status as a high-profile Russian dissident, who was put under house arrest in Moscow in 2017 and prevented from traveling outside his native country for five years.Kirill Serebrennikov’s “The Black Monk.”Christophe Raynaud de Lage/Avignon Festival Not that war features in “The Black Monk,” which is based on an 1894 short story by Anton Chekhov. Despite its scale — four parts, a running time of nearly three hours and an expanded cast of 22 in Avignon — it is more personal than political in nature, and mainly focused on the descent of one man, Kovrin, into delusion and megalomania.Each part of the show focuses on a single character’s perspective. First there is Yegor, Kovrin’s childhood guardian; then Tanya, Yegor’s daughter, who marries Kovrin. He makes for a terrible husband, unsurprisingly, and in the third and fourth parts, his recurring hallucination — a black monk — takes over the stage as well as Kovrin’s mind.At the midway point, the structure starts to feel repetitive, and a few people walked out as a result. Yet Serebrennikov wisely pivots to a more operatic approach in the second half with a large chorus of singers and dancers, all in black monk’s cowls. The result aptly fills the expansive Cour d’Honneur stage and testifies to Serebrennikov’s obvious craft and passion for the characters, although the choreography remains too generic to fully carry the piece to its intended destination.On other stages, the mood was also bleak, as it often has been under Py. “Iphigenia,” staged at Avignon’s opera house, sneaked in a nod to Py’s successor, the Portuguese writer and director Thiago Rodrigues. The director, Anne Théron, opted for Rodrigues’s 2015 retelling of the myth of Iphigenia, sacrificed by the Greeks in exchange for the wind needed to carry them across the sea to Troy. It is a delicate, evocative version, told by characters who remember — or refuse to remember — the story even as it happens, as if the tragedy was bound to happen over and over again.Bashar Murkus’s “Milk.”Christophe Raynaud de Lage/Avignon FestivalChild sacrifice also features in Bashar Murkus’s “Milk,” albeit in a very different context. Murkus, a young Palestinian director based in Haifa, took maternal milk as a central metaphor for this wordless work about mourning mothers. The women onstage cradle mannequins, slowly then frenetically; milk flows from the fake breasts they wear, ultimately filling the stage. The result is full of arresting tableaux, despite a subpar musical score.For vibrant, energetic theater, however, the best bet remains to delve into the motley Fringe offerings. This year, for instance, nine companies from the French island of Réunion, in the Indian Ocean, banded together to present an invigorating mini-series of shows.David Erudel and Lolita Tergémina in “The Game of Love and Chance,” directed by Tergémina.Sébastien MarchalOne company, Sakidi, is performing Marivaux’s “The Game of Love and Chance,” a classic 18th-century French comedy, in the Creole language spoken on Réunion (with subtitles). Réunion Creole is very rarely heard on French stages, and this vivacious production by Lolita Tergémina, at the Chapelle du Verbe Incarné theater, suggests that is a shame. Since the language is heavily influenced by French, a lot of it is understandable without the subtitles, and the translation is full of images that make Marivaux feel fresh again.New French plays often come to Avignon for a trial run, too, and at a theater called 11, the playwright Jean-Christophe Dollé has landed a hit with “Phone Me.” This well-crafted intergenerational story revolves around what now feels like a 20th-century artifact, the phone booth. There are three onstage along with three central characters — a member of the French Resistance during World War II and her son and granddaughter, in the 1980s and 1990s — whose secrets converge in this unlikely setting.Amal Allaoui, left, and Alice Trocellier in “Tales of the Fairies,” directed by Aurore Evain.Mirza DurakovicAmong 1,570 shows, there is a special kind of delight in happening upon a gem like “Phone Me,” or “Tales of the Fairies,” a bright, family-friendly production at the Espace Alya. The director and scholar Aurore Evain is part of a French movement aiming to reclaim the legacy of forgotten female artists, and in Avignon, she has revived two fairy tales by the 17th-century writer Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy.On a pocket-size stage, at lunchtime on a Monday, Evain’s three actors and musicians brought a demanding queen, a kind prince and some very helpful animals to whimsical life. Call it a sprinkle of vintage Avignon fairy dust: There was certainly some in the air.Avignon Festival. Various venues, through July 26.Off d’Avignon. Various venues, through July 30. More

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      Finding a New Theater Audience, Far From France’s Cities

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      In rural gardens, forests and public squares, young stage artists fed up with the country’s rigid scene are striving for diversity and spontaneity.MAURENS, France — The village of Maurens, 300 miles south of Paris, has a population of around 1,000. It has a church; a single bakery; and, since 2013, a summer theater festival, the Théâtre du Roi de Coeur.One recent evening, the scale of the event’s ambition was obvious. On an open-air wooden stage, a cast of 12 put impressive energy into “Fanny, Me and the Others,” a four-hour adaptation of a Marcel Pagnol trilogy. Even when a drizzle started, the members of audience, sitting on chairs and haystacks, opened their umbrellas and stayed put.The Roi de Coeur isn’t alone in bringing large-scale theater to rural backyards. It is one of 17 founding members of France’s Federation of Local Festivals and Theaters, which got underway last month at the Avignon Festival. Its members, dotted around the country in areas with few playhouses, have come together to show that rural theater can compete with bigger city stages, and to push for greater recognition of their contribution to France’s cultural ecosystem.Behind the initiative is a group of millennials, who graduated from top drama schools and found themselves frustrated with the rigid structure of France’s theater world. While the performing arts in the country receive generous public funding, a significant portion goes to state-backed playhouses in large cities. Competition to get independent projects off the ground is fierce; young artists have complained for years about the cost of attending the crowded Avignon Fringe, for instance.Pélagie Papillon, left, and Martin Jaspar in “Fanny, Me and the Others.” Sébastien AngladaChloé de Broca, who started the Roi de Coeur with Félix Beaupérin, said they were warned as students about the profession’s harsh reality. “We knew very quickly that big productions with a large cast were reserved to an elite of sorts,” she said.Unaware of one another at first, the federation’s members carved an alternative path, turning to “spaces not originally meant for theater,” as their official charter puts it. These include gardens, forests, private residences and public squares. The Roi de Coeur’s two stages are installed every year on the property of de Broca’s sister-in-law. Other festivals tour small cities and villages. La Luzège, which is based just east of the Roi de Coeur, stages productions in different venues every night from mid-July to mid-August. Theater doesn’t get much more adaptable than that. Last week, because of the rain, La Luzège moved “Bon Appétit, Messieurs!,” a show inspired by Victor Hugo’s writings, from a garden to a nearby community center with five minutes’ notice.With its focus on underserved rural communities, the federation is finding new audiences. The first wave of cultural decentralization in France, initiated by postwar governments, aimed to break Paris’s stranglehold on artistic life and redirected funding to midsize cities — but often stopped there. “This is a new decentralization. We’re reaching people where they are,” said Romane Ponty-Bésanger, one of La Luzège’s co-directors.Fabrice Henry, left, and Ambroise Daulhac in “Bon Appétit, Messieurs!,” directed by Victor Calcine and Romane Ponty-Bésanger at La Luzège en Corrèze.Victor CalcineSome locals are delighted. Séverine Bonnier, who co-owns a bed-and-breakfast, Ô Vents d’Anges, in Maurens, saw all four of the Roi de Coeur’s productions this year; they were the first performances she’d seen since moving to the area a few years ago, she said. “It’s a matter of time, between work and two children at home,” she added. Some festivals in the federation focus on classic, family-friendly titles, while others stage contemporary plays. One common feature, however, is the absence of a single artistic director: Most operate as collectives. There are four co-directors at La Luzège, and de Broca and Beaupérin make decisions with six others at the Roi de Coeur. Roles are fluid, too. Actors might direct, or help with sets, costumes and other tasks, like tending bar. Nicolas Grosrichard (César in “Fanny, Me and the Others”) wrote a witty short play for children this year, “Anne the Pirate.” They also work fast. While the traditional funding model for independent French theatermakers allows for one creation every other year, most of the federation’s members put together between three and six productions every 12 months. Rehearsal time is limited, and finesse sometimes sacrificed. In the case of “Fanny, Marius and the Others,” conflicts between characters turned into shouting matches, without the nuance more preparation might have afforded.“We’re looking for diversity and spontaneity,” de Broca said. “It’s almost unfinished theater, but it makes it even more alive. The artists are sharing their research with the audience, and people really respond to that.”The Nouveau Théâtre Populaire, founded in the Loire village of Fontaine-Guérin in 2009 and run by an 18-member collective, has become the blueprint for this new generation of local festivals. (The Roi de Coeur was modeled on it, de Broca said.) Matthieu Kassimo, left, and Dorothée Le Troadec in “Anne the Pirate,” directed by Nicolas Grosrichard at the Théâtre du Roi de Coeur.Sébastien MazetIt began when the grandmother of an actor, Lazare Herson-Macarel, allowed the organizers to take over her backyard. After her death in 2012, a crowdfunding campaign raised 70,000 euros, about $82,000, to keep the festival going on her property, and the local authorities opted to buy it and lease it without charge to the collective.The festival’s audience has kept growing, and in 2019, before the pandemic, it attracted around 10,000 visitors. Last month, it achieved a different milestone when the Avignon Festival, the most prestigious event in French theater, featured one of its productions, “The Sky, the Night and the Party,” a six-hour trilogy of Molière plays. The three plays will alternate this month in Fontaine-Guérin.The theater establishment may be waking up to the vitality of rural festivals, but there is still a long way to go, the federation’s members say. Economically, festivals remain fragile, especially during the pandemic, and they often fall outside the criteria for local and regional funding. “Performances in rural settings aren’t recognized as ‘real’ performances, because they don’t take place in identified venues,” Pauline Bolcatto, a member of the Nouveau Théâtre Populaire and one of the federation’s architects, said in a phone interview.This summer, the federation’s members exchanged tips and information, Bolcatto said, and discussed how best to implement France’s new health pass, a government policy that requires businesses and event organizers to check proof of vaccination or a negative coronavirus test before admitting patrons.The noise generated by daily outdoor performances hasn’t been to everyone’s taste in quiet countryside spots. In 2019, the Nouveau Théâtre Populaire had to fight a lawsuit initiated by a neighbor; rulings so far have been in the troupe’s favor. The Roi du Coeur also faced complaints, and found a compromise: The festival will continue in its current form until the tenth edition, in 2023, and will then move to a yet-to-be-decided location.“The Sky, the Night and the Party — Psyché,” directed by Julien Romelard at Nouveau Théâtre Populaire, part of the Avignon Festival.Christophe Raynaud de Lage/Avignon FestivalStill, a chance visit may open unexpected doors. Étienne Fraday, who played the leading role of Césario in “Fanny, Me and the Others,” was working as a boilermaker when he fell in love with the Roi de Coeur in 2016. After being a volunteer for two years, he decided to retrain as an actor, and is currently studying at the prestigious Court Florent in Paris. “This adventure has changed some lives,” de Broca said. More

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      Avignon Festival Forges Ahead, Despite Virus Restrictions

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      The French theater festival’s Fringe offering is giving some respite from the pandemic, even as new rules to stop coronavirus transmission are making it harder to get to the shows.AVIGNON, France — It sounds like a virologist’s nightmare: 1,070 theater productions; 116 venues, most of them within Avignon’s cramped medieval center; and everywhere, festivalgoers sitting shoulder to shoulder in indoor spaces.Yet the Fringe offering at this summer’s Avignon Festival — which runs parallel to the main event, and is known as “le Off” — has forged ahead, even as the more contagious Delta variant of the coronavirus became the dominant strain in France.Is it problematic to enjoy excellent performances under the circumstances? With the rituals of Avignon, including unmasked performers handing out publicity fliers in the street, came a sense of normalcy. Still, a sneaky sense of guilt permeated conversations with theatergoers — not least when new restrictions were announced, shortly after the Avignon Festival began.Last week, the French government decreed that a “health pass” — a QR code proving full vaccination or a negative coronavirus test result — would be required from July 21 for all venues with over 50 seats. Restaurants, bars and trains will follow from Aug. 1. (The health pass requirement previously applied only to events with more than 1,000 audience members.)Frustration was palpable in Avignon in the days before the rule came into force. While roughly half of Fringe venues are small enough to skirt it, some companies opted to leave early, and bigger shows reported ticket returns and a drop in bookings. Last weekend, as widespread demonstrations against the policy swept France, protesters filled Avignon’s biggest avenue, shouting “Liberté!” (“Freedom!”)Marc Arnaud in “The Metamorphosis of Storks,” his one-man show at the Théâtre du Train Bleu.Alejandro GuerreroWhile the Avignon Festival’s official lineup (“le In,” in local parlance) went from bleak to bleaker in its themes, Fringe fare at least offered some respite from pandemic worries, since comedy has always been a prominent part of this less highbrow portion of the festival.Two original one-man shows, by Mehdi-Emmanuel Djaadi and Marc Arnaud, combine jokes and impressions with explorations of deep-seated inner conflicts. Djaadi’s “Coming Out,” especially, is an exercise in stereotype busting. The coming out in question is religious: The show recounts the 34-year-old comedian’s conversion from Islam to Catholicism.Support for his choice was scarce, as Djaadi tells it at the aptly named Théâtre des Corps Saints (Theater of the Holy Bodies). His family, of Algerian descent, felt he was turning his back on them; a priest explained that he didn’t want any trouble; in artistic circles, many were ill at ease with what they saw as the Catholic Church’s homophobia and conservatism.Yet instead of expressing the resentment he might have felt, Djaadi looks back on his journey, from teenage rebellion and drug dealing to a Catholic wedding, with amused affection. He points to contradictions on both sides, and France’s churchgoers come in for pointed satire, too.In “The Metamorphosis of Storks,” Arnaud focuses on a much shorter stretch of time. He and his wife went through the process of in vitro fertilization, and we meet Arnaud as he is about to donate a sperm sample — a process that brings up far more feelings than he expected.Morgane Peters as Effie in “Iphigenia in Splott,” directed by Blandine Pélissier at Artéphile.Blandine PélissierAs he stalls impatient hospital staff, his monologue covers his sexual education, his attempts at therapy and anxiety about parenthood. It’s a brisk, honest reckoning with the travails of masculinity, which packed the Théâtre du Train Bleu to the rafters (before the health pass requirement was implemented).Not that Avignon audiences were turned off by darker shows. At Artéphile, one of the few Fringe venues to also function as a year-round cultural space, the director Blandine Pélissier offered a stark and convincing production, “Iphigenia in Splott.”The Welsh playwright Gary Owen is relatively unknown in France, but his 2015 reworking of the Iphigenia myth — translated by Pélissier and Kelly Rivière — should prompt curiosity about his work. Here, the sacrificial victim is Effie, from the Cardiff district of Splott, a blaze of raging energy who becomes unexpectedly pregnant. This 90-minute monologue convincingly attributes the lack of support she encounters to social and medical service cuts, and the actress Morgane Peters takes the role from hard-edge anger to pain with poignant ease.Productions with larger casts were a bigger challenge this year, given that a positive coronavirus test among the company was enough to call a show off, and the director and actress Julie Timmerman downsized her show “A Democrat” as a result. Timmerman retooled this excellent production about Edward Bernays, the American nephew of Freud known as “the father of public relations,” for just two actors (Mathieu Desfemmes and herself). The result is adroitly written and witty, a worthy look at the dangers of Bernays’ techniques when they’re used for propaganda purposes.While the Avignon Festival’s official, curated lineup involves far fewer productions than the Fringe, it was hit with a handful of coronavirus-related cancellations. The artistic teams of two choreographers, Dada Masilo and Dimitris Papaioannou, were unable to travel to Avignon, while Eva Doumbia’s “Autophagies” saw its run interrupted when members of the cast and crew had to go into isolation after coming into contact with an infected person.Mathieu Desfemmes and Julie Timmerman in “A Democrat.”Roland BaduelTwo European productions that went ahead make a lasting impression. Emma Dante, of Italy, choreographs as much as she directs, and in “Misericordia,” theater becomes dance and vice versa. In it, three women raise a child, Arturo, who is described as mentally disabled and whose mother was a victim of domestic violence. Together, they form a bickering, complex family. The dancer Simone Zambelli not only captures Arturo’s twitching, disjointed body, he spins his physical vulnerability and moments of joy into poetry, knotting himself into expressive shapes.Avignon also hosted the stage version of “Pieces of a Woman.” Before it became a film starring Vanessa Kirby last year, the playwright Kata Weber and the director Kornel Mundruczo imagined it for the TR Warszawa playhouse in Warsaw, and the Polish cast delivered a gut punch in Avignon at the Lycée Théodore Aubanel.The play starts with the same lengthy labor scene as the film, but it covers less narrative ground after the central couple’s baby is stillborn. Whereas the screen version details the trial of a midwife who attended to the birth, this is only hinted at as a possibility onstage, and Maja, who lost her child, refuses to go through with it. Instead, the characters’ grief plays out over a long family dinner at the home of Maja’s mother.The result requires more patience on viewers’ part, but rewards it with a fully formed portrait of a family adrift. In that sense, the stage version of “Pieces of a Woman” completes Weber and Mundruczo’s puzzle: Let’s hope Avignon won’t be its only international stop.The cast of “Pieces of a Woman,” by the playwright Kata Weber and the director Kornel Mundruczo.Christophe Raynaud de Lage/Festival d’Avignon More

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      At the Avignon Festival, a Bleak Start

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      Grief. Rising fascism. Utopias gone wrong. The plays were grim in the early days of the annual theater event in France.AVIGNON, France — The Avignon Festival couldn’t have set the stage any better for Tiago Rodrigues. On Monday, the director from Portugal was announced as the next director of the event, one of the most important on the European theater calendar. The same night, his new production of Chekhov’s “The Cherry Orchard,” starring Isabelle Huppert, opened the 2021 edition, which runs through July 25.Excitement was high, despite the enormous line to enter the Cour d’honneur, an open-air stage installed on the grounds of Avignon’s Papal Palace. The French government requires proof of vaccination or a negative coronavirus test for all events with more than 1,000 audience members, and the checks led to a 40-minute delay and grateful applause when the preshow announcements finally started.Two hours later, the reception was noticeably less warm. While Rodrigues has brought well-liked productions of “Antony and Cleopatra” and “Sopro” to Avignon in recent years, his “Cherry Orchard” is an oddly amorphous proposition, built around actors who often seem worlds apart onstage.It doesn’t help that Huppert plays Lyubov, the aristocratic landowner who remains blind to her family’s financial plight, like a close cousin of Amanda Wingfield in “The Glass Menagerie,” which she just performed in Paris. She brings the same diction and the same childlike, brittle energy to both characters, down to her trembling lips.Alex Descas, left, and Huppert with other members of the ensemble in “The Cherry Orchard.”Christophe Raynaud de Lage/Festival d’AvignonThe production accommodates Huppert rather than the other way around, and doesn’t require her stage partners to blend in, either. Rodrigues hasn’t enforced a specific acting style, and the community at the heart of “The Cherry Orchard” never really coheres.A few performers make the most of it. In a welcome departure from French habits, Rodrigues opted for colorblind casting: Lyubov’s relatives are all played by Black actors, as is Lopakhin, the self-made man who ultimately buys Lyubov’s estate. In that role, Adama Diop is by turns forceful and sympathetic. The role of the aging Firs, who yearns for the glory days of the aristocracy, is taken with lovely lightness by a veteran of the French stage, Marcel Bozonnet.In lieu of Lyubov’s beloved trees, the stage is filled with the Cour d’honneur’s old seats, which this year were replaced with new wooden ones. There is even a heavy-handed number about the renovation — one of several interpolations to Chekhov’s text — from Manuela Azevedo and Helder Gonçalves, who provide live music throughout.“Things will change,” Azevedo sings. “Even these chairs changed places.” It’s a nice touch, but here as elsewhere, this “Cherry Orchard” is too anecdotal to say much about the world. Rodrigues will presumably return to Avignon in 2023, the first edition he is scheduled to oversee. Let’s hope for a little more insight then.“The Cherry Orchard” aside, this year’s lineup finally gives women some prime spots, after years of male-skewed programming under the current director, Olivier Py. The premiere of “Kingdom,” by the Belgian director Anne-Cécile Vandalem, suffered its own delay because of heavy rain, but those who waited were rewarded with the festival’s finest new work up to that point.“Kingdom” is the conclusion of a trilogy Vandalem started in Avignon with “Tristesses” in 2016, followed by “Arctique.” The overall theme of the three plays is “the end of humanity,” according to the playbill, and after tackling far-right extremism and global warming in the first two, Vandalem offers a bleak tale of utopia gone wrong in “Kingdom.”Members of the cast on the set of “Kingdom,” the last play of a trilogy created by Anne-Cécile Vandalem.Christophe Raynaud de Lage/Festival d’AvignonIn it, two families have opted to forgo the modern world and return to nature. Yet they come to resent one another because of land disputes and perceived slights, and their sustainable way of living becomes untenable.Vandalem is fond of weaving video into her work, here by way of cameramen ostensibly filming a documentary about one of the families. They follow the central characters into their small cabins, which are visible and surrounded with trees and water onstage, yet closed to the audience.Intimate moments are seen only on a large screen, and this setup draws the audience into the characters’ lives with greater realism than is achieved by many plays. The cast sustains the narrative tension with understated force — all the way to the unraveling of their small world.“Kingdom” was far from the only bleak offering of the festival’s early days. The Brazilian theatermaker Christiane Jatahy also returned, with “Between Dog and Wolf,” a creation freely inspired by Lars von Trier’s 2003 film, “Dogville.” Nicole Kidman’s role onscreen as an outsider mistreated by the community in which she seeks refuge is taken here by the actress Julia Bernat, also of Brazil.Christiane Jatahy’s production “Between Dog and Wolf,” a creation freely inspired by Lars von Trier’s 2003 film, “Dogville.” Magali DougadosThe cast is constantly filmed, with less precise editing than in “Kingdom,” and most of “Dogville’s” twists and turns are recreated, but Jatahy also finds some distance from her source material. Bernat and others address the audience directly at several points, and they break character to explain the movie’s ending. After that, they elaborate on what they see as the rise of fascism in Brazil and elsewhere.There is dark subject matter, and then there is “Fraternity,” Caroline Guiela Nguyen’s much anticipated follow-up to her 2017 hit, “Saigon.” “Fraternity’s” supernatural premise is similar to that of the HBO series “The Leftovers”: a portion of humanity (in “Fraternity,” 50 percent) has simply vanished, leaving their loved ones reeling.Unlike “The Leftovers,” however, “Fraternity” is in no way subtle in exploring grief. Over three and a half hours, it drains and badgers viewers emotionally: Many around me cried at least once. After so many people have died of Covid-19 in the past year and a half, this is dangerous territory, and Guiela Nguyen addresses people’s sense of loss like a bull in a china shop.The action takes place in a “Center for Care and Consolation,” designed for survivors to process grief by leaving video messages for the departed. These are performed by a laudably diverse group made up of professional and nonprofessional actors from around the world. (Multiple languages are spoken in “Fraternity,” with rather clumsy live translations by other performers.)Perhaps because the amateurs are still finding their feet, the acting often feels one-note, with much yelling and little in the way of emotional arcs. The plot revolves around the idea that people’s hearts slowed almost to a halt after the Great Eclipse, as the disappearance is known, which in turn slowed down the universe. Some related sci-fi developments soon grow silly, especially when an oversize plastic heart is brought in to absorb the survivors’ memories of their lost partners and relatives, in a bid to keep the planets moving.“Fraternity,” Caroline Guiela Nguyen’s much anticipated follow-up to her 2017 hit, “Saigon.”Christophe Raynaud de Lage/Festival d’AvignonAt least Guiela Nguyen didn’t hold back on what was an ambitious, humanist project, and it’s a treat to again see Anh Tran Nghia, the star of “Saigon,” even though she’s underused. But theatermakers also have a duty to take care following a real-life tragedy. Bombarding the audience with relentless pain doesn’t necessarily lead to catharsis, and we’ve all been through enough.Avignon FestivalVarious venues in Avignon, France, through July 25; festival-avignon.com. More